Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC Tomis, now Constanta AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet. His poetry, largely imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.
Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively, and his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid offers an epic unlike those of his predecessors, a chronological account of the cosmos from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and legends about supernatural transformations from the Greek and Roman traditions.
Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an error and a carmen a mistake and a poem (Tr. 2.207). The error itself is uncertain. Ovid may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus, or withheld knowledge of such an affair. The carmen, however, is probably his Ars Amatoria, a didactic poem offering amatory advice to Roman men and women, which had been in circulation for several years.
It was during this period of exile -- more properly known as a relegation -- that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which illustrate his sadness and desolation away from Rome. Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis, he still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Many of the poems are addressed to her, but also to Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and sometimes God, to himself, and even sometimes to the poems themselves, which expresses his heart-felt solitude. The famous first two lines of the Tristia demonstrate the poet's misery from the start.
Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment.
September 23, 2000 - The London Times
The long-lost villa of Ovid has been discovered on the banks of the Tiber, together with what may be a portrait of the Roman poet not seen for 2,000 years.
The villa, which dates to between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, had been found by workmen clearing an area of small workshops to make way for a new council offices. They found the villa walls 15ft down, and a mosaic covered in clay that was in "mint condition".
Professor Messineo said that he had "no doubt" that the villa was the one described by Ovid in his letters. "The poet says he can see people streaming across the Milvian Bridge , and then dividing to go along the Via Flaminia, which ran along the river - and still does - or up the Via Cassia, which heads north at right angles to it. This is exactly what we see from this spot today." The old Milvian Bridge - where the Emperor Constantine won a momentous victory in AD312, paving the way for the conversion of Rome to Christianity - is still used by pedestrians.
Raffaella Tione, the archeologist in charge of the dig, said that additional evidence associating the villa with Ovid was provided by a five-metre-square mosaic of black and white geometric patterns forming the floor of what was once a porticoed riverside open-air summer dining room.
In the middle of the mosaic is a color picture of middle-aged man with a white-flecked beard wearing a crown of laurel leaves and carrying a flowering staff with bows tied to it. He appears to have a slight squint. Signora Tione said the picture faced the benches where Ovid's guests would have sat eating and drinking. "It could be Dionysus, the god of fertility and drunken revels, or a follower such as Silenus," she said. "It could be an ideal poet, perhaps Greek. But we prefer to think it is Ovid."
At the height of his fame Ovid was exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea, and was never allowed to return to his beloved villa. Ovid says he fell foul of the Emperor not only because of his irreverent poetry but also because of an unnamed "error". Some scholars believe this refers to Ovid's adulterous affairs, which may have included a liaison with Livia, the Emperor's wife.
Signora Tione said her team had discovered five further rooms originally decorated with colored plaster and columns, as well as a grotto. Much of the villa now lies under blocks of flats. Professor Messineo said the mosaic would be incorporated into the new council offices. Visitors would view it from a walkway.
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